Manta: Visualizations for Science Communication using Python

Manta is an open-source Python package designed to create animations, visualiza- tions, and presentation slides, focusing on scientific communication. Built upon the Manim mathematical animation library, Manta extends its functionality to support the production of videos and presentation slides. The software package has comprehensive features that address various visualization needs, including creating neural net- works, UML class diagrams, graphs, charts, and QR codes. Manta is available across multiple repositories and can be installed via pip. It is based on the Manim Com- munity Edition, ensuring a reliable foundation for animations and visualizations. The package is designed to extend Manim, offering a complete toolkit for creating visual presentations, particularly suited for educational, scientific, and technical content. The package includes numerous components to generate common visualizations in sci- entific presentations, making it especially useful in machine learning, data science, and mathematics. Additionally, Manta includes a library of NerdFont icons, enabling users to incorporate a variety of icons into their visualizations. This feature reduces the need to manually add separate icon files to a Manim project. Manta's slide-building functionality is based on the Manim Editor Python package, which allows for the creation of visually appealing slides. The package supports extensive customization op- tions, including themes inspired by terminal applications such as NeoVim and Tmux and popular themes like Tokyo Night and Catppuccin. Users can also define custom themes, ensuring presentations align with personal or institutional branding. Manta provides predefined templates and components, akin to the design elements in Pow- erPoint, that streamline the creation of visual assets. This functionality enables fast and consistent production of professional-quality content. The package also includes features such as automatic slide indexing and creation of sections for presentations. In addition, Manta offers slide templates similar to PowerPoint's master slides, ensuring consistency across presentations and simplifying complex slides' design. The package adheres to the principles of open science and follows the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) Research Data Principles. Manta's source code and doc- umentation are publicly available on GitHub, GitLab, and PyPI, and the package is also hosted on Zenodo with a DOI for citation. This commitment to openness ensures that Manta's resources are easily accessible, reusable, and aligned with the best practices in reproducible research. Manta is fully documented with an extensive example gallery, making it accessible. In the context of research data management education, Manta supports data literacy by enabling researchers and educators to visually communicate data workflows, structures, and methodologies. It is particularly well-suited for skills development in domains where understanding abstract or complex data is essential. Through structured visualizations, Manta enables researchers to present complex data and processes in a narrative form.